Meth crisis. Biker Gangs.

Can the quiet town of Grand Banks survive?

By Mike Martin

Title: SAFE HARBOUR
Author: Mike Martin
Publisher: Ottawa Press and Publishing
Pages: 264
Genre: Mystery

BOOK BLURB:

Sgt. Windflower is on a special assignment in St. John’s and adjusting to life in the big city. He is navigating traffic, a difficult boss at work and what seems like an epidemic of missing girls. He becomes more interested when he discovers that one of the girls is from Grand Bank. Then a girl approaches his RCMP van one night and he is pulled into the underlife of the capital city. But he still manages to enjoy all of the good things in life. His family, old and new friends, and the love of living so close to the Atlantic Ocean. Welcome back to St. Windflower Mysteries.

Windflower looked across the lake. Well, he would have if he could have seen anything through the thick blanket of fog that had been sitting on Quidi Vidi Lake for the past seven days. One whole week, he thought. Every day since they had arrived in the port city of St. John’s, it had been the same. Windflower knew the lake was out there because he remembered running around it as his daily exercise when he was temporarily stationed here a few years back.

Sheila Hillier, his wife, knew the lake was out there as well. She’d spent a couple of months doing rehab at the nearby Miller Centre when she was recovering from a serious car accident. If there wasn’t any fog, she could look out her window in May and see the rowers getting their practice in as part of their training for the Royal St. John’s Regatta, an annual event that took place down there in August.

But it was a long way from spring as Windflower gazed out his window at the typical scenery for a January morning. He was the first one up, except for Lady, his collie, and Molly, the cat who never seemed to sleep anyway. She would close her eyes sometimes, but Windflower had never come into a room with her in it when she wasn’t awake and watching him. Windflower liked this time of day when his two children got up. They were Amelia Louise, his soon-to-be two-year-old daughter, and his almost-daughter, Stella, who he and Sheila were fostering.

He liked this house on Forest Road, too. It wasn’t similar to his and Sheila’s in Grand Bank on the southeast coast of Newfoundland, but for a rental it suited them perfectly. It had four bedrooms, two and a half baths and a large backyard for the kids to play in and, if the weather held, for Windflower to barbeque. But the likelihood of the weather staying just simply foggy and damp was not good. There was snow in the forecast and more snow coming after that.

Windflower had been in snowstorms in St. John’s before. It was hard to miss one if you travelled here regularly in the fall, winter or spring. And they didn’t come with a few flakes or a few inches of accumulation. No, snowstorms here often meant feet of snow, sometimes in the double digits, and he had come out some mornings to look for his car, only to find it buried under a virtual mountain of snow. The worst storms came in double or even triple waves. That’s when a storm system would blow through and dump one load of snow and then drift out to the nearby Atlantic Ocean. Unfortunately for the good people of St. John’s, it would blow back in and repeat the damage—sometimes more than once.

Windflower grabbed his anorak and hat and took Lady out to the backyard. He also brought his smudging kit. Inside were small packets of his four sacred medicines: cedar, sage, sweetgrass and tobacco. There was also an abalone shell, a small box of wooden matches and an eagle feather fan that had been gifted to him by his grandfather many years ago.

My Review:

Sgt. Windflower and his family have taken up temporary residence in St. John. Windflower has taken a temporary job so his wife Sheila can go back to school to get her MBA.

Windflower starts to see posters of missing girls all over town. When he learns that one of the girls is from Grand Banks Windflower starts to look into the missing girls. His old boss calls him up and asks him to investigate the missing girls.

Safe Harbour takes us into the life of Sgt. Windflower as he looks into finding the missing girls. It also shows us how so very helpful he is at helping out his wife at home with their two daughters. Windflower and his wife Sheila have a two-year-old daughter Amelia Louise and they are also fostering a four-year-old girl, Stella.

Safe Harbour is the first Sgt. Windflower book that I have read and I don’t really feel as if I missed anything as far as the case of the missing girls goes and getting to know who Sgt. Windflower and his wife were or what kind of people they were. But I would like to know more about them and their life in Grand Bank before moving to St. John. I would also like to know the story about how Stella came into their lives. And not to mention other crimes that he has solved in other books.

Safe Harbour kept me guessing and the pages turning as it held onto all its secrets only revealing them a little bit at a time. I really enjoyed getting a look into Sgt. Windflower’s home life. When I was reading Safe Harbour it felt as if I was a part of Sgt. Windflower’s world with each word I read as it was so vividly described making it so easy to picture as if it was a movie instead of a book. I can’t wait to check out the rest of Sgt Windflower’s stories.

I highly recommend Safe Harbour to anyone looking for a great mystery read! One-click your copy of this awesome book, Safe Harbour today for another great mystery to solve!

Mike Martin was born in St. John’s, NL on the east coast of Canada and now lives and works in Ottawa, Ontario. He is a long-time freelance writer and his articles and essays have appeared in newspapers, magazines and online across Canada as well as in the United States and New Zealand.

He is the author of the award-winning Sgt. Windflower Mystery series set in beautiful Grand Bank. There are now 10 books in this light mystery series with the publication of Safe Harbour. A Tangled Web was shortlisted in 2017 for the best light mystery of the year, and Darkest Before the Dawn won the 2019 Bony Blithe Light Mystery Award. Mike has also published Christmas in Newfoundland: Memories and Mysteries, a Sgt. Windflower Book of Christmas past and present.

Mike is Past Chair of the Board of Crime Writers of Canada, a national organization promoting Canadian crime and mystery writers and a member of the Newfoundland Writing Guild and Ottawa Independent Writers.